"Yes. I don't see how I could have helped remembering." Her laugh was
low, musical, a little hurried, yet cool.

Dorn was not familiar with girls. He had worked hard all his life, there
among those desert hills, and during the few years his father had
allowed him for education. He knew wheat, but nothing of the eternal
feminine. So it was impossible for him to grasp that this girl was not
wholly at her ease. Her words and the cool little laugh suddenly brought
home to Kurt the immeasurable distance between him and a daughter of one
of the richest ranchers in Washington.

"You mean I--I was impertinent," he began, struggling between shame and
pride. "I--I stared at you.... Oh, I must have been rude.... But, Miss
Anderson, I--I didn't mean to be. I didn't think you saw me--at all. I
don't know what made me do that. It never happened before. I beg your
pardon."

A subtle indefinable change, perceptible to Dorn, even in his confused
state, came over the girl.

"I did not say you were impertinent," she returned. "I remembered seeing
you--notice me, that is all."

Self-possessed, aloof, and kind, Miss Anderson now became an
impenetrable mystery to Dorn. But that only accentuated the distance she
had intimated lay between them. Her kindness stung him to recover his
composure. He wished she had not been kind. What a singular chance that
had brought her here to his home--the daughter of a man who came to
demand a long-unpaid debt! What a dispelling of the vague thing that had
been only a dream! Dorn gazed away across the yellowing hills to the dim
blue of the mountains where rolled the Oregon. Despite the color, it was
gray--like his future.

"I heard you tell father you had studied wheat," said the girl,
presently, evidently trying to make conversation.

"Yes, all my life," replied Kurt. "My study has mostly been under my
father. Look at my hands." He held out big, strong hands, scarred and
knotted, with horny palms uppermost, and he laughed. "I can be proud of
them, Miss Anderson.... But I had a splendid year in California at the
university and I graduated from the Washington State Agricultural
College."

"You love wheat--the raising of it, I mean?" she inquired.

"It must be that I do, though I never had such a thought. Wheat is so
wonderful. No one can guess who does not know it!... The clean, plump
grain, the sowing on fallow ground, the long wait, the first tender
green, and the change day by day to the deep